Firm rents four Nvidia H200s to test '80x cheaper' DeepSeek claim

The Call Center Doctors, a call center consultancy that builds and runs call floors for other businesses, rented a 4x H200 box on Sept. 27 to serve DeepSeek V4.1 Flash to its Claude Code agents in place of Opus 5.5, according to its test write-up. The write-up is aimed at anyone who has heard that DeepSeek is “80x cheaper” than Claude. Using its real coding mix, the firm's whole box topped out at around 213 tokens written per second at an on-demand cost of $440.88 per day, versus $184–$223 per day for the same work via DeepSeek’s API. The call center went back to Opus 5.5 at a lower price than the box would cost at on-demand rates.

DeepSeek’s API is priced at $0.15 per 1 million new input tokens off-peak, $0.003 cached input tokens, and $0.60 per 1 million output tokens. Peak costs are double. …